Social Media Exposure to Muscle-Building Content Tied to Steroid Use Intentions in Men

Time spent on social media is the metric that tends to dominate public conversation about digital health risks. But duration of use may be less important than what people encounter while they are online. A survey-based study of more than 1,500 boys and men in Canada and the United States found that the content and behavioral patterns of social media use predicted intentions to try anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) more reliably than total screen hours alone.

The study, based on data from The Study of Boys and Men (N=1,515), was led by Kyle T. Ganson, PhD, MSW, assistant professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work. Participants reported spending about two hours per day on social media - roughly comparable to time spent watching videos or browsing the web. Of those three categories, only social media use showed a significant association with AAS intentions. Web browsing showed a smaller association; video watching did not.

Content Matters More Than Clock Time

The strongest predictors of AAS use intentions were not about duration. They were about what participants saw and how they responded to it.

Participants who frequently viewed images of muscular, lean, or athletic male bodies reported significantly higher AAS intentions. Exposure to content explicitly promoting muscle-building supplements and drugs showed the strongest association of all. Men who reported more symptoms of social media addiction - compulsive use, preoccupation, and interference with daily life - also reported higher intentions. And those who regularly compared their own bodies to those of others on social media showed elevated intentions as well.

Together, these findings point to a fairly specific exposure pathway: online fitness culture that centers hyper-muscular body ideals, supplements commercial messaging, and social comparison dynamics creates conditions in which performance-enhancing drugs appear more normalized and accessible.

AAS Carry Real Health Risks

Anabolic-androgenic steroids are synthetic versions of testosterone used to increase muscle mass and athletic performance. Their health risks are well established and span multiple systems: cardiovascular complications including enlarged heart and elevated stroke risk, hormonal disruption, mood changes including aggression and depression, liver damage, and potential physical and psychological dependence. These risks apply even when use occurs outside competitive sport - the vast majority of AAS users are recreational.

The study focused on intentions rather than actual use, which is an important limitation. Intention does not always translate to behavior, and self-reported survey data is subject to social desirability effects - participants may underreport or overreport depending on perceived norms. The study also cannot establish that social media exposure caused higher intentions; it is observational, meaning shared underlying factors (such as pre-existing body dissatisfaction or muscularity ideals) could drive both the social media patterns and the AAS intentions simultaneously.

Implications for Prevention

Ganson argues that prevention efforts need to address more than screen time limits. "We need to understand what boys and men are seeing, how often they are comparing themselves to others, and how normalized supplement and drug marketing has become in digital spaces," he said.

The practical implications fall into several areas. Media literacy programs that help young men critically evaluate muscular ideals - recognizing the role of filters, lighting, pharmaceutical assistance, and selective presentation in online fitness content - could reduce the normalization effect. Regulatory attention to drug and supplement marketing practices on social platforms represents another lever. And clinical screening for body image concerns and muscularity-focused content use could flag individuals at elevated risk before AAS use begins.

The broader cultural context matters too. Online fitness communities have grown dramatically as platforms have expanded short-form video and algorithmically curated content feeds. The incentive structures of these platforms favor engagement, which means provocative, aspirational body imagery tends to circulate widely. Whether that structural feature of social media constitutes a public health concern significant enough to warrant platform-level intervention is a question the data alone cannot answer - but studies like this one lay the empirical groundwork for asking it.